Author Archive: George Karidis

In a classic scene from Duck Soup, Groucho Marx (as Rufus T. Firefly) is given a report, and he responds, "Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can't make head or tail out of it." That deadpan line may have come from a movie that was released in 1933, but it alludes to an idea that's relevant to this day: Younger generations have a unique perspective, and their insights can be extremely valuable. James, my nine-year-old son, has a seemingly innate understanding of technology, and after watching TechStars Cloud graduates deliver their demo day pitches last year, he became very interested in startups. I can say this authoritatively because he's been bugging me for month to let him go to another session.

With his school year winding down, I decided I'd make a deal with him: He could join me at the Tech Wildcatters Pitch Day, but he'd have to write a blog about what he learned about each of the companies. When I saw the post he wrote, I realized that having a nine-year-old listen to elevator pitches from startups provides a great barometer for how well a presenter expressed the company's value proposition. I'll turn the floor over to James and let him share what he learned about the eleven companies that presented at #TWPitchDay2013:

Today I went to the Granada Theater in Dallas with my dad to meet start up companies. They were doing presentations to investors to raise money.

My dad did the introduction for HedgeChatter. I really did not understand what the do, but my dad said they did "DID": They turn Data into Information so people can make better Decisions. Not sure what that really means but he seems to like their business.

Here is a quick summary of each of the companies and what they do:

Voncierge — Voncierge.com — @LittleDressBook
Voncierge is a virtual wedding website that lets brides find the time and day for appointments in a short time.

GroupRaise — GroupRaise.com — @GroupRaise
GroupRaise is a platform for charitable organizers to set up fundraisers online at local restaurants.

ScribeSense — ScribeSense.com — @ScribeSense
ScribeSense is a better way to track and improve student learning. Their online platform grades.

CrowdFeed — CrowdFeed.co — @CrowdFeed
CrowdFeed is an app that has a huge market, making music and merchandise available on the spot.

SmokePhone — SmokePhone.com — @SmokePhone
Smokephone is a site that lets you save your ten precious digits from strangers, and then you can delete them at any time.

HedgeChatter — HedgeChatter.com — @HedgeChatter
HedgeChatter is a social analytics tool for the stock market. It helps investors make more money in less time (from 12 hours to 6).

SocialGlimpz — SocialGlimpz.com — @SocialGlimpz
SocialGlimpz is a market insight tool to glean insights from users and build consumer strategy. It is an alternative to slow, expensive tools in the market.

501Fund — 501Fund.com — @501Fund
501Fund is a company that helps with fundraising and saving money.

Secure PressID — SecurePressID.com — @SecurePressID
SecurepressID is a security company that lets your hand be the username and login to protect from hackers.

My favorite of all companies was GroupRaise. I like it because I like helping people, and that is what they do too! Klick Push was great too. They give you prizes like free music for getting to new levels in games. Maybe they can do that for Minecraft.

This is the second time I went to an event like this. Last year I met a lot of cool companies that came to Dallas from San Antonio. My dad said they were part of something called TechStars Cloud. I even presented to them about Steve Jobs. That made me nervous, but it was worth it.

I am already excited about going to my next demo day. And maybe someday I will be on the stage with a new idea.

As part of my role at SoftLayer, I have the opportunity and privilege to mentor numerous entrepreneurs and startup teams when they partner with us through our Catalyst program. One question I hear often is, "Should I join an accelerator?" My answer: "That all depends." Let's look at the five lessons entrepreneurs should learn before they decide to join a startup accelerator or incubator program.

Lesson 1: The founders must be committed to the success of their venture.
Joining an accelerator or incubator comes with some strings attached — startups give up between 6 to 10 percent of their equity in exchange for some cash and structured program that usually lasts around three months. Obviously, this kind of commitment should not be taken lightly.

Too often, startups join accelerator programs before they are ready or mature enough as a team. Sometimes, a company's idea isn't fully baked, so they end up spending as much time "creating" their business as they do "accelerating" it. As a result, that company isn't able to leverage an accelerator's resources efficiently throughout the entire program ... The founders need to establish a vision for the business, begin laying the groundwork for the company's products and services, and be 100% committed to the accelerator program before joining. If you can't say with confidence that your startup meets all three of those requirements, don't do it. Take care of those three points and proceed to the next lesson.

Lesson 2: Be prepared to leverage what you are given.
Many startups join accelerator and incubator programs with unrealistic expectations. Participation in these programs — even the most exclusive and well-known ones — by no means guarantees that you'll raise additional money or have a successful exit. These programs provide startups with office space, free cloud services, and access to mentors, investors, recruiters and media ... Those outstanding services provide participating startups with a distinct competitive advantage, but they don't serve up success on a silver platter. If you aren't ready work tirelessly to leverage the benefits of a startup program, don't bother.

Lesson 3: Take advice and criticism well; mentors are trying to help.
"Mentorship" is very tough to qualify, and criticism is difficult to take ... Especially if you're 100% committed to your business and you don't want to be told that you've done something wrong. Mentors in these startup programs have "been there and done that," and they wouldn't be in a mentorship position if they weren't looking out for your best interest and the ultimate success of your company.

Look programs that take mentorship seriously and can provide a broad range of expertise from strategy to marketing and business development to software architecture to building and scaling IT infrastructure. Then be intentional about listening to the people around you.

Lesson 4: Do your research and make an informed decision.
With the proliferation of startups globally, we're also seeing an evolution in the accelerator ecosystem. There are a number accelerators being positioned to help support founders with ideas on a global, regional and local basis, but it's important to evaluate a program's vision with its execution of that vision. Not all startup programs are created equal, and some might not offer the right set of resources and opportunities for your team. When you're giving up equity in your company, you should have complete confidence that the accelerator or incubator you join will deliver on its side of the deal.

Lesson 5: Leverage the network and community you will meet.
When you've done your homework, applied and been accepted to the perfect startup program, meet everyone you can and learn from them. One of the most tangible benefits of joining an accelerator is the way you can fast track a business idea while boosting network contacts. Much in the way someone chooses a prestigious college or joins a fraternity, some of the most valuable resources you'll come across in these programs are the people you meet. In this way, accelerators and incubators are becoming a proxy for undergrad and graduate school ... The appeal for promising entrepreneurs is simple: Why wait to make a dent in the universe? Today, more people are going to college and fewer are landing well-paying jobs after graduation, so some of the world's best and brightest are turning to these communities and foregoing the more structured "higher education" process.

Even if your startup is plugging along smoothly, a startup accelerator or incubator program might be worth a look. Venture capitalists often trust programs like TechStars and 500 Startups to filter or vet early stage companies. If your business has the stamp of approval from one of these organizations, it's decidedly less risky than a business idea pitched by a random entrepreneur.

If you understand each of these lessons and you take advantage of the resources and opportunities provided by startup accelerators and incubators, the sky is the limit for your business. Now get to work.

Bill Gates once told a journalist that everyone should care about developments in India because the world's largest democracy (of 1.2 billion people) and tenth-largest economy is quickly catching up with us. I recently had the opportunity to see those developments first-hand, and I wholeheartedly agree with Bill's sentiment. Innovation and technology breakthroughs are not owned by or limited to the United States, and as international markets mature, we're going to see more and more entrepreneurship and startup activity overseas. Now I don't mean to imply that the demise of Silicon Valley is imminent, but its influence will be greatly diminished in the future, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I just returned from a round-the-world trip that included nearly two weeks in India as part of a 500 Startups-sponsored market exploration tour called Geeks on a Plane. The tour stopped through Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi, with meetups for local entrepreneurs, startups, investors and some of the most influential companies in India's technology ecosystem. While in India, I had the chance to meet several SoftLayer customers — including Zoomin, PowerWeave, and Vidya Mantra — and their insight into the growing technology culture in the region was eye-opening.

One of the most interesting characteristics shared by many of the entrepreneurs I spoke with was that they were building businesses with a "hyper-local" focus: Unique business models that are specifically geared toward serving local communities while leveraging the latest technologies in mobility and e-commerce. This distinction is particularly noteworthy because they didn't assume that they'd need to succeed in the US market or compete with companies in the US to build their businesses ... And they're absolutely right. The opportunities that exist for hyper-local entrepreneurs in these emerging markets are staggering.

FlipKart is known as "The Amazon of India." It's very similar to the online shopping giant most of us know and use regularly, but with some unique regional twists. For example, because credit card and electronic payments in India are not as prevalent or reliable as they are in much of the world, orders are taken via both an online ordering system and through FlipKart call centers. Once processed, a highly developed network of "scooters" delivers about 50 percent of FlipKart's orders, and the payment is provided at the customer's door — IN CASH. While that might seem simplistic, each courier has a smartphone that allows them to become a geo-located, connected, data sharing entity. Hundreds of millions of dollars in FlipKart orders are delivered each year with very few issues, despite the fact that most of us can't even imagine how the company could operate that way in the US.

Another great example of how innovators are using technology to redefine businesses is redBus, India's largest bus ticketing company. A huge percentage of travel in India is done very inexpensively by bus, and before redBus came on the scene, travelers took their chances by buying tickets through middlemen and ticket brokers, often getting ripped off or becoming victims of double-booking. By centralizing the ticketing process, redBus is able to provide a reliable way to book a seat on any of India's vast system of buses via phone, online or in person. redBus offers the largest selection of bus seats in the country with over 350 bus operators and a flexible network of boarding points, timing and bus types. It's an incredibly simple service that meets a clear need for a hyper-local audience by leveraging the technologies being built and improved around the world.

If my two weeks in India taught me one thing, it was that the startups don't need to conquer international markets ... They can strive to service their local communities and interests, and they'll be just as successful (if not more). Our Catalyst program has just begun its international expansion into India, and the future certainly looks bright. In fact, I'm proud to announce that we've already signed up our first Catalyst program member in India with many more to come!

As we continue working with startup communities around the globe, I learn more and more about how the world is changing, and I get a stronger appreciation for the cultural and economic ties that bind us all together.

I was born and raised in Brockville, Ontario, and I've always been a proud Canadian. In 2000, I decided to leave my homeland to pursue career options south of the 49th parallel, so I became an active participant in Canada's so-called "brain drain." It's never easy starting over, but I felt that my options were limited in Canada and that I wouldn't find many opportunities to make an impact on a global stage.

Fast-forward to 2012. Early in the year, we were introduced to GrowLab — a leading Vancouver based accelerator — by our friends at East Side Games Studio. They seemed to have a lot of incredible stuff going on, so I planned an exploratory mission of sorts ... In June, I'd visit a few Canadian cities with an open mind to see what, if anything, had changed. With the Catalyst Program's amazing success in the US, I hoped we could hunt down one or two Canadian startups and accelerators to help out.

I was very pleasantly surprised at what I found: A vibrant, thriving Canadian community of entrepreneurs that seemed to match or exceed the startup activity I've seen in Silicon Valley, Boulder, Boston, New York, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Dubai. How times have changed! Investing in the Canadian startup scene was a no-brainer.

We'll enroll startups participating in those organizations into the Catalyst Program, and we'll provide infrastructure credits (for servers, storage and networking), executive mentoring, engineering resources and limited financial support. SoftLayer wants to become the de facto Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider for Canadian startups and startups worldwide, so this is a huge first step onto the international stage. More importantly — and on a personal level — I'm excited that we get to help new companies in Canada make a global impact with us.

As a Canadian expat, having the opportunity to give something back means a great deal to me. I see an incredible opportunity to nurture and help some of these Canadian startups take flight. SoftLayer is still an entrepreneurial company at heart, and we have a unique perspective on what it takes to build and scale the next killer app or game, so we feel especially suited to the task.

One of the Canadian entrepreneurs we've been working with sent us this great video produced by the Vancouver-based GROW Conference about entrepreneurship, and it immediately resonated with me, so I wanted to be sure to include it in this post:

We've already started working with dozens entrepreneurs in Vancouver, Toronto, Hamilton and Waterloo who embody that video and have kindred spirits to my own. SoftLayer has a few Canadian ex-pats on our team, and as Catalyst moves into Canada officially, we're all extremely proud of our heritage and the opportunity we have to help.

Some have called our foray into the Canadian market an "international expansion" of sorts, I think of it more as a "coming home party."

SoftLayer has a passion for social media, online gaming and mobile application developers. We were in "startup mode" just a few years ago, so we know how much work it takes to transform ideas into a commercially viable enterprise, and we want to be the platform on which all of those passionate people build their business. To that end, we set out to find ways we could help the next generation of web-savvy entrepreneurs and digital pioneers.

About a year ago, we kicked off a huge effort to give back to the startup community. We jumped headfirst into the world of startups, incubators, accelerators, angel investors, venture capitalists and private equity firms. This was our new ecosystem. We started to make connections with the likes of TechStars and MassChallenge, and we quickly became a preferred hosting environment for their participants' most promising and ambitious ideas. This ambitious undertaking evolved into our Catalyst Program.

When it came to getting involved, we knew we could give back from an infrastructure perspective. We decided to extend a $1,000/mo hosting credit to each Catalyst company for one full year, and the response was phenomenal. That was just the beginning, though. Beyond the servers, storage and networking, we wanted to be a resource to the entrepreneurs and developers who could learn from our experience, so we committed to mentoring and making ourselves available to answer any and all questions. That's not just lip service ... We pledged access to our entire executive team, and we made engineering resources available for problem-solving technical challenges. We're in a position to broker introductions and provide office space, so we wanted didn't want to pass up that opportunity.

One of the superstars and soon-to-be graduates of Catalyst is MODX, and they have an incredible story. MODX has become leading web content management platform (#4 open source PHP CMS globally) by providing designers, developers, content creators and Unix nerds with all the tools they need to manage, build, protect and scale a web site.

Back in December 2011, the MODX team entered the program as a small company coming out of the open source world, trying to figure out how to monetize and come up with a viable commercial offering. Just over 10 months later, the company has grown to 14+ employees with a new flagship product ready to launch later this month: MODX Cloud. This new cloud-hosting platform, built on SoftLayer's infrastructure, levels the playing field allowing users to scale and reach everyone with just a few clicks of a mouse and not need to worry about IT administration or back-end servers. Everything associated with managing a web site is fully automated with single-click functionality, so designers and small agencies can compete globally.

We're proud of what the MODX team has accomplished in such a short period of time, and I would like to think that SoftLayer played a significant role in getting them there. The MODX tag line is "Creative Freedom," and that might be why they were drawn to the Catalyst Program. We want to "liberate" entrepreneurs from distractions and allow them to focus on developing their products – you know, the part of the business that they are most passionate about.

I can't wait to see what comes out of Catalyst next ... We're always looking to recruit innovative, passionate and creative startups who'd love to have SoftLayer as a partner, so if you have a business that fits the bill, let us help!

When SoftLayer began back in 2005, the term “cloud computing” was rarely used if at all. The founders of SoftLayer had an ambitious vision and plan to build a service platform that could easily automate, scale and meet the demands of the most sophisticated IT users. They were obviously onto something. Since then, we’ve emerged as the world’s largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, helping the next generation of web savvy entrepreneurs realize their dreams. But we didn’t do it alone. We had partnerships in place—including working with Parallels.

Today everyone is trying to scramble and figure out how this “new” IT shift will work itself out. Our friends over at Parallels had a similar ambitious undertaking—trying to automate and enable a complete gamut of hosting and cloud services. This created a framework for our partnership. We worked with their engineering and sales teams, starting back in 2005, which resulted in Parallels Plesk Panel being offered as an option on every SoftLayer server. That was just the beginning. We are now deploying Parallels Automation for hosting partners and have plans to integrate with their Application Packaging Standard offering. Plans to integrate with other products like Parallels Cloud Server are also on the horizon. It all comes down to helping hosting companies and other joint customers thrive and succeed.

To find out more about our partnership and how it can help streamline your entry into cloud computing click here. We are also the only “Diamond” sponsor at the Parallels Summit 2012 APAC in Singapore this year. We share a heritage and understanding with Parallels borne from a need to simplify and solve IT problems on a broad scale. Now that’s what I call a likeminded partnership.

"Game Changers" in technology force a decision: Adapt or die. When repeating rifles gained popularity in the late 1800s, a business of manufacturing muzzle-loading or breech-loading rifles would have needed to find a way to produce a repeating rifle or it would have lost most (if not all) of it's business to Winchester. If a fresh-faced independent musician is hitting it big on the coffee shop scene in 2012, she probably won't be selling out arenas any time soon if she refuses to make her music available digitally. Just ask any of the old-timers in the print media industry ... "Game Changers" in technology can be disastrous for an established business in an established industry.

That's pretty intimidating ... Even for tech businesses.

Shifts in technology don't have to be as drastic and obvious as a "printed newspaper v. social news site" comparison for them to be disruptive. Even subtle advances can wind up making or breaking a business. In fact, many of today's biggest and most successful tech companies are scrambling to adapt to two simple "game changers" that seem terribly significant:

IPv6

"The Cloud"

IPv6

ARIN has publically announced the need to shift to IPv6 and numerous articles have outlined the D-Day for IPv4 space. Most experts agree, its coming fast and that it will occur sometime in 2010 at the current pace (that's about two years for those counting). IPv6 brings enough IP space for an infinite number of users along with improved security features and several other operational efficiencies that will make it very popular. The problem lies between getting from IPv4 to IPv6.

When IPv4 exhaustion was just a blip on the horizon, many businesses probably thought, "Oh, I'll get around to it when I need to. It's not a problem yet." When IANA exhausted the IPv4 pool, they probably started picking up the phone and calling providers to ask what plans they had in place. When some of the Internet's biggest websites completed a trial transition to IPv6 on World IPv6 Day last year, those businesses started feeling the urgency. With today's World IPv6 Launch, they know something has to be done.

Regardless of how conservative providers get with IPv4 space, the 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses in existence will not last much longer. Soon, users will be accessing an IPv6 Internet, and IPv4-only websites will lose their opportunity to reach those users. That's a "game changer."

"The Cloud"

The other "game changer" many tech businesses are struggling with these days is the move toward "the cloud." There are a two interesting perspectives in this transition: 1) The challenge many businesses face when choosing whether to adopt cloud computing, and 2) The challenges for businesses that find themselves severing as an integral (sometimes unintentional) part of "the cloud." You've probably seen hundreds of blog posts and articles about the first, so I'll share a little insight on the second.

When you hear all of the hype about cloud computing and cloud storage offering a hardware-agnostic Utopia of scalable, reliable power, it's easy to forget that the building blocks of a cloud infrastructure will usually come from vendors that provided a traditional hosting resources. When a computing instance is abstracted from a hardware device, it's opens up huge variations in usage. It's possible to have dozens of public cloud instances using a single server's multi-proc, multi-core resources at a given time. If a vendor prices a piece of software on a "per server" basis, how do they define a "server" when their users are in the cloud? It can be argued that a cloud computing instance with a single core of power is a "server," and on the flip-side, it's easy to define a "server" as the hardware object on which many cloud instances may run. I don't know that there's an easy way to answer that question, but what I do know is that applying "what used to work" to "what's happening now" isn't the right answer.

The hardware and software providers in the cloud space who are able to come up with new approaches unencumbered by the urge to continue "the way we've always done it" are going to be the ones that thrive when technology "game changers" emerge, and the providers who dig their heels in the dirt or try to put a square peg into a round hole will get the short end of the "adapt or die" stick.

We've tried to innovate and take a fresh look at every opportunity that has come our way, and we do our best to build relationships with agile companies that we see following suit.

I guess a better way to position the decision at the beginning of this post would be to add a little tweak: "Innovate, adapt or die." How you approach technology "game changers" will define your business's success.

A few years ago, I went through a nightmare trying to get to permanent resident status in the United States. My file sat in a box for over a year, was lost, re-submitted and FINALLY rushed through by Ted Kennedy's office. And I was on a "fast track" due to a long record of published research and employment history. I had the means to pay lawyers and the time to repeat the filing and wait for a decision. If I didn't have the means or the time to wait for the process to complete, I don't know where I'd be, but in all likelihood, it wouldn't be here. It's no surprise that immigration reform is high on my list of priorities, and given SoftLayer's involvement in the USCIS Entrepreneurs in Residence program along with Lance's appointment to a Bloomberg committee focused on immigration reform, it's clear I'm not alone.

SHORTAGE OF WORKERS IN INNOVATION INDUSTRIES: Jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math ("STEM" fields) are increasing three times faster than jobs in the rest of the economy, but American students are not entering these innovative fields in sufficient numbers. As a result, by 2018, we face a projected shortfall of 230,000 qualified advanced-degree STEM workers.

SHORTAGE OF YOUNG WORKERS: The US population is aging, baby boomers are retiring en masse, and the growth in the US labor force has slowed to historic lows of less than 1 percent. We cannot continue to produce the GDP growth the nation has come to expect without dramatic increases in productivity or welcoming more working age immigrants.

A STALLED ECONOMY: The US has faced years of stunted economic growth. History shows that new businesses are the biggest drivers of job creation, yet the most recent US Census data show that the number of business startups has hit a record low.

This concern isn't unique to the United States. With a global focus on innovation and technology, countries around the world are actively competing for the best and the brightest. In Canada, a report a few weeks ago spoke to Canada's need to double in size in the next few decades or risk losing relevance and becoming just another resource-rich colony. The nation's response? It's ready to open its doors to more immigrants.

The same applies to the United States ... It just may take longer.

Go back to how this country was built, and apply that to today. The biggest difference: The "skilled trades" we talk about in the most general sense are no longer carpenters like my grandfather but highly educated programmers, engineers and researchers. The idea isn't to replace the programmers, engineers and researchers in the US, rather it's to meet the existing unmet needs for programmers, engineers and researchers.

In all of SoftLayer's efforts to affect change in the US immigration policy, we have to make clear that our goal is not to drop the walls simply to add more permanent residents. It's about lowering many of the current artificial barriers that might prevent the next Fortune 500 founder from starting his or her business in the United States. If you don't think that's a serious concern, I'd point to a pretty surprising stat in the "Not Coming to America" report: "Today, more than 40 percent of America's Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or a child of an immigrant."

Immigration drives the economy. It's not a drain on the economy. Every country needs more smart people because smart people create new ideas, new ideas become new businesses, and new businesses create new jobs.

Because this is a politically charged issue, it's one I know many people don't necessarily agree with. Along with immigration, we have to look at how the education system can empower young people like my son to become the programmers, engineers and researchers that the US will need, and we have to be intentional about not simply adding permanent residents for the sake of adding permanent residents. If you have any thoughts one way or the other, I'd encourage you to share them with us here in a blog comment or link us to any of the resources you've found interesting in researching and discussing the topic.

SoftLayer is in the business of helping businesses scale. You need 1,000 cloud computing instances? We'll make sure our system can get them online in 10 minutes. You need to spin up some beefy dedicated servers loaded with dual 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors and high-capacity SSDs for a new application's I/O-intensive database? We'll get it online anywhere in the world in under four hours. Everywhere you look, you'll see examples of how we help our customers scale, but what you don't hear much about is how our operations team scales our infrastructure to ensure we can accommodate all of our customers' growth.

When we launch a new data center, there's usually a lot of fanfare. When AMS01 and SNG01 came online, we talked about the thousands of servers that are online and ready. We meet huge demand for servers on a daily basis, and that presents us with a challenge: What happens when the inventory of available servers starts dwindling?

Truck Day.

Truck Day not limited to a single day of the year (or even a single day in a given month) ... It's what we call any date our operations team sets for delivery and installation of new hardware. We communicate to all of our teams about the next Truck Day in each location so SLayers from every department can join the operations team in unboxing and preparing servers/racks for installation. The operations team gets more hands to speed up the unloading process, and every employee has an opportunity to get first-hand experience in how our data centers operate.

If you want a refresher course about what happens on a Truck Day, you can reference Sam Fleitman's "Truck Day Operations" blog, and if you want a peek into what it looks like, you can watch Truck Day at SR02.DAL05. I don't mean to make this post all about Truck Day, but Truck Day is instrumental in demonstrating the way SoftLayer scales our own infrastructure.

Let's say we install 1,000 servers to officially launch a new pod. Because each pod has slots for 5,000 servers, we have space/capacity for 3,000-4,000 more servers in the server room, so as soon as more server hardware becomes available, we'll order it and start preparing for our next Truck Day to supplement the pod's inventory. You'd be surprised how quickly 1,000 servers can be ordered, and because it's not very easy to overnight a pallet of servers, we have to take into account lead time and shipping speeds ... To accommodate our customers' growth, we have to stay one step ahead in our own growth.

This morning in a meeting, I saw a pretty phenomenal bullet that got me thinking about this topic:

Truck Day — 4/3 (All Sites): 2,673 Servers

In nine different data center facilities around the world, more than 2,500 servers were delivered, unboxed, racked and brought online. Last week. In one day.

Now I know the operations team wasn't looking for any kind of recognition ... They were just reporting that everything went as planned. Given the fact that an accomplishment like that is "just another day at SoftLayer" for those guys, they definitely deserve recognition for the amazing work they do. We host some of the most popular platforms, games and applications on the Internet, and the DC-Ops team plays a huge role in scaling SoftLayer so our customers can scale themselves.

Last week, I spent a few days at GDC in San Francisco, getting a glimpse into the latest games hitting the market. Game developers are a unique bunch, and that uniqueness goes beyond the unbelievable volume of NOS Energy Drinks they consume ... They like to test and push the IT envelope, making games more diverse, interactive and social.

The new crop of games showcased at GDC is more resource-intensive — it's almost like watching an IT arms race; they're upping the ante for all online gaming companies. The appetite from the public remains relentless, and the pay-off can be huge. Consider that gaming industry research firm DFC Intelligence predicts that worldwide market revenue generated solely from online games is set to reach $26.4 billion in 2015, more than double the $11.9 achieved in 2009.

That's where SoftLayer comes in. We understand the high stakes in the gaming world and have tailored our IaaS offerings for an optimal end-user experience that stretches from initial release to everyday play. Take a look at what game developer OMGPOP (a SoftLayer customer) achieved with Draw Something: Almost overnight it became the #1 application in Apple's App Store, tallying more than 26 million downloads in just a few weeks. To put the volume of gameplay into perspective, the game itself is generating more than 30 hours of drawings per second. That's what what we refer to as "Internet Scale." When YouTube hit one hour of video uploads per second, they came up with a pretty impressive presentation to talk about that scale ... and that's only one hour per second.

Gamers require a high-performance, always on, graphically attractive and quick-responding experience. If they don't get that experience, they move on to the next game that can give it to them. With our core strengths of automation and extensive network reach, game developers come to us to easily enable that experience, and in return, they get a platform where they can develop, test, deploy and yes, play their latest games. True "Internet Scale" with easy consumptive billing ... Get in and out quickly, and use only what you need.

Some of the most interesting and innovative use cases of how customers take advantage of our platform come from the gaming industry. Because we make it easy to rapidly provision resources (deploy dedicated servers in less than two hours and cloud servers in as few as five minutes) in an automated way (our API), many developers have started incorporating cloud-like functions into their games and applications that add dedicated resources to their infrastructure on-demand as you'd only expect to see in a virtual environment. Now that Flex Images are available, we're expecting to see a lot more of that.

As I was speaking with a few customers on the show floor, I was amazed to hear how passionate they were about what one called the "secret ingredient" at SoftLayer: Our network. He talked about his trials and tribulations in delivering global reach and performance before he transitioned his infrastructure to SoftLayer, and hearing what our high-bandwidth and low-latency architecture has meant for his games was an affirmation for all of the work we've put into creating (and continuing to build) the network.

The rapid pace of innovation and change that keeps the gaming industry going is almost electric ... When you walk into a room filled with game developers, their energy is contagious. We ended GDC with an opportunity to do just that. We were proud to sponsor a launch party for our friends at East Side Game Studios as the celebrated the release of two new games — Zombinis and Ruby Skies. Since their NomNom Combo puzzle game is one of the most addicting games on my iPhone, it was a no-brainer to hook up with them at GDC. If you want a peek into the party, check out our GDC photo album on Facebook.

To give you an idea of how much the gaming culture permeates the SoftLayer offices, I need only point out a graffiti mural on one of the walls in our HQ office in Dallas. Because we sometimes get nostalgic for the days of misspent youth in video arcades playing Pac Man, Donkey Kong and Super Mario, we incorporated those iconic games in a piece of artwork in our office:

If you are an aspiring game developer, we'd like to hear from you and help enable the next Internet gaming sensation ... Having a good amount of experience with our existing customer base should assure you that we know what we're talking about. For now, though, it's my turn to go "Draw Something."